On Music
GOODMAN, JOHN
On Music QUADRIPHONY/ QUADRAPHONY BY JOHN GOODMAN Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, a whole nation of ignorant people listened to music instead of sound. In that Golden Age no one...
...Don't call us, ar...
...Our perceptions of the music are being intruded upon—totally...
...Technological developments have spurred progress-as-usual...
...This is because much of the sound in a hall is reflected, after a certain delay time, rather than beamed at the listener...
...Second, the technical problems are considerable...
...There will be no new, viable, serious music in this country until we: (1) sort out the technology, deciding whether the new electronic devices are instruments or tools...
...It can be very exciting, depending upon the program material, recording technique, and playback room size...
...2) reestablish a plurality of musical values...
...They are slow, however, to point out that filmmaking and composing are highly specialized applications...
...Well, it cost a lot more, too, but that was soon offset by the miracles of mass production...
...If by improvement we mean more realistic reproduction, there can hardly be any question that four-channel systems are an improvement over two-channel systems where orchestral reproduction is concerned...
...Spokesmen are quick to point out that the concept is not new: the three-channel sound of Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940) antedated stereo (two-channel) by many years, and the electronic poems of Edgard Varese in the '50s called for a multiplicity of sound sources...
...What actually goes on in our living rooms when we listen to "the live sound of a concert hall performance faithfully recreated...
...and that differing, incompatible designs of tapes, amplifiers, and tape decks are already competing in the market...
...Much of the present confusion in the arts is the product of a mechanistic idea of perfection...
...Then the advent of the synthesizer confused things further, presenting a new world of raw sound that cried out for revolutionary, abstract (hence, traditionally "musical") forms...
...Business is good...
...Heavy orchestral music is generally best, and so is a fairly small, acoustically "dead" room, since a large one will negate much of the recorded ambience by adding its own reverberations...
...So Walter Carlos played Bach on the synthesizer and imitated old instruments...
...that the home market will in the near future be enticed to invest huge sums in equipment to keep up with the "state of the art" if not the Joneses...
...Crown, Teac and Telex (Viking) are making open-reel tape equipment...
...on the one hand, quadri-phony is supposed to be a great step forward...
...The people were encouraged to buy stereo gear because, in spreading and focusing sonic content, it more closely approximated a musical reality...
...Playback of the four signals in a room of about this size realistically simulates the effects of the original location...
...A latter-day development is the stereo music piped into the heads of air travelers...
...Special tape heads, to play back the four tracks in synchronization, and four separate amplification systems are of course required...
...we'll call you...
...The basic premises of quadri-phony, or quadraphony (even the spelling has yet to be agreed upon), are not terribly complicated, although the execution is...
...In any case, musical and not technological values must determine how electronics are to be used...
...If music was sold to them canned, they were content to heat it and eat it—but everybody recognized the real thing...
...Both the logic and the madness of our pursuit of progress find unified expression in the music industry's puffery over four-channel sound...
...Only the birds aren't free...
...Two-channel stereo can reproduce accurately enough the actual sound delivered by musicians, but with the addition of two speakers behind the listener (and their associated components) one can theoretically recreate the acoustical environment of the concert hall...
...In that Golden Age no one had heard of noise pollution or stereo...
...They could listen to musique concrete (except for the typical tape doctoring) simply by opening their windows...
...Cage says, "We are as free as birds...
...That's the final word, folks: look, listen, or eat...
...But alas, the people no longer knew how to distinguish music from sound, or sound from noise...
...When people are taking off their clothes at Woodstock, they couldn't care less if the sound system is accurate or not...
...How refreshing to find, after all these years, that the responsibility is ours...
...High fidelity has always aimed at the precise definition of sound, which is a relative matter depending on our ability to perceive significant differences, whether in equipment or musical performances...
...Igor Stravinsky, the professed conservative, thinks that the disappearance of our Western musical mainstream signifies not only the irresponsibility and facelessness of the present but, perhaps, the end of our need for creative art...
...Several companies are planning to market four-channel tapes in the cassette or cartridge format (which would be ideal), but this will take some doing...
...We are as committed as birds, and identically...
...Some would call it noise pollution...
...The opposite of high fidelity has traditionally been Muzak, which aims at diffusion of both attention and perception through a vapid cloud of sound...
...The Handel recording was brilliant in four-channel sound, and the Berlioz—with its four brass bands stationed about the four corners of the hall, its choirs and full orchestra—was a natural for this medium...
...At the Acoustic Research (ar) listening room in New York's Grand Central Station, the demonstration formerly employed Vanguard's open-reel "Surround Sound" tapes...
...3) spread and teach the gospel of perception according to Cage...
...In the first place, the dealers don't want it...
...To create these and other effects, a number of techniques have been used...
...The function of the rear speakers is to present this reflected sound with the precise delay and directional orientation of the particular concert hall or opera house where the recording was made...
...At the moment, ar is using cartridge tapes of its own manufacture...
...3 and 9, and the Berlioz Requiem...
...If you want to hear how inferior today's best stereo systems are, go to the ar music room and listen to what happens when the attendant switches from two-channel to four-channel playback of the same program...
...Sometimes the four channels have been used to create what one writer has called the "double ping-pong effect"—bombarding the listener with discrete musical messages from each of the four points...
...Experimental fm broadcasts from two stereo stations transmitting simultaneously have been made in Boston and New York (reportedly, a way has also been found to matrix four signals for broadcast by one fm station...
...Who needs four-channel...
...Others are able to regard the hi-fi set as merely an inert tool that leaves no trace on the object of our attention...
...These are available commercially, and include Handel's Jephtha, the Mahler Symphonies No...
...H. H. Scott, among others, has an amplifier available...
...Are we in a plush auditorium seat, reading program notes, or is the babv crying while we're drinking Scotch and talking...
...Cage clearly demonstrated that you can't recognize noise pollution until you know what noise is...
...Acoustic Research believes that it is the responsibility of consumers to decide whether they wish equipment to be made for such a system...
...A recent article in Audio magazine glorifies the technological complexity of the sound and movie system on twa's Boeing 747...
...On the other hand, caveat emptor...
...The question is ultimately one of realism and the value of the anesthetic search for perfect reproduction that the industry has undertaken...
...Near the end of the article, the writer brings in the human element: "But you don't have to listen on the twa 747s if you don't like the music and don't want to hear the movie...
...But most of this stuff will not be in the stores for some time...
...How does it sound...
...You can just sit there and eat if you wish...
...Third, the industry, after pushing stereo on us, is apprehensive that the public will react to quad sound as a gimmick, a marginal improvement at maximum cost, ar, having already done much experimental work in the area, artlessly claims that its listening room demonstrations provide a unique opportunity for consumers to display their feelings "before the 'products' have been developed and the advertising campaigns started...
...Music was to be a kind of ecostruc-ture, open-ended and chance-directed...
...At about the same time, John Cage the musical mage and others were teaching the more literate public to listen to the environment...
...Many of us are uncomfortablv aware that an electronic device is being used as an instrument, that is, to color, mask, or leave a trace on a given sonic content...
...The pursuit of realism, as in any art, is finally a dead end...
...An inventor named Peter Scheiber has developed a process to encode four separate signals onto a typical stereo disc, which would be compatible with two- or four-channel equipment...
...the same might be said of the society at large...
...The head salesman in one of New York's biggest hi-fi houses said, "I can't keep up with the things that are on the market now...
...Usually, four microphones have been set up in the middle of a hall at the four imaginery corners of a typical rectangular living room, say 10 by 18 feet...
...Likewise, a good hi-fi set lets one attend to the comparative virtues of, say, Landowska and Lili Kraus renditions of the same Mozart concert...
...From a radical point of view, John Cage suggests the same thing...
Vol. 53 • June 1970 • No. 12
